There is a line in this song that has stuck in my mind for years, and I always realized that, it being an old English ballad, it was once literally true once as far as health care goes, but not anymore. The line goes “if living were a thing that money could buy, you know the rich would live and the poor would die.” I think about women who die in this country of breast cancer because they don’t have health insurance, and heart disease (and my friend Al who died because he couldn’t afford the procedure to fix his heart) and the thousands of other instances where money can indeed buy life.

I think about the death penalty and how money almost always can buy life, I think about... Well, you get the idea, there are so many examples of how a person’s lack of money can kill him or her. Many of our lefty blogger friends demonstrated that lack of health care kills when they wrote about what happened to Jim Cappozolla, the the owner of the Rittenhouse Review and many more examples of posts detailing what we in the left blogosphere lost when Jim died.

Jim’s death could have been prevented with adequate health care, but the recent untimely death of Jon Swift, one of the best “conservative” writers on the net, Jon Swift is an example of one that MAY have been preventable. Maybe not, although a good inexpensive screening can often find a latent aneurysm and the price for the screening is quite inexpensive. My wife and I had a screening for aneurysms done a year or so ago and the price was less than $200. Maybe if Jon Swift (aka Al Wiesel) had been screened for an aneurysm he would still be with us today. We will never know, I guess. But I’m sad to report that yes, Virginia, living is a thing that money can buy and Santa can’t save you from the Republicans who would rather see you die than perhaps be the person who finds a cure for cancer, who invents the solution to the energy problem, or who solves some other problem that has plagued humanity for decades.

Juan Cole reminds us that we are in last place in all the industrialized countries when it comes to preventing deaths that are preventable. How criminal is that? Maybe we should start calling those who are stopping health care reform criminals and murderers, because they are murdering those without health care, and violate the Fifth (or Sixth if you are Catholic or Lutheran) commandment which admonishes us all that we shall not kill. No legislators are excluded. No, not one. Particularly those legislators who are on the record as having stated that we must live by the Ten Commandments. God has a special place in hell reserved for these hypocrites when their time comes.

The chances of such solutions to the problems of humanity happening in this country without health care for all is thus substantially diminished. Some other nation will reap the benefits of that technological breakthrough if our health care system kills the one person here who could have solved that problem or some other problem of equal importance dies because our legislators stopped or held up health care for all the children of God that live in this country.

Thus this song is wrong in one important line. Remember that.